The Grahams & The Donalds by Rab Anderson and Tom Prentice

Scottish Mountaineering Club Hillwalkers' Guide

A new Scottish Mountaineering Club Hillwalkers' Guide is a major
event. Their best known books, among many, are their long-standing guides to
"The Munros", and to "The Corbetts and Other Scottish Hills". We suspect that
very few people who have ever set foot on a Scottish mountain did so without
the benefit of first consulting what have to be considered the definitive
guides to individual Scottish mountains over 3,000ft and 2,500ft (Munros and
Corbetts respectively). There are any number of books published about Scottish
mountains, and many are extremely good: but the SMC Hillwalkers' Guides are the
"gold standard", the books that any hillwalker or climber wants to own - or,
almost certainly, already owns - and around which many climbing libraries have
been built.

Against this background we approached "The Grahams & The
Donalds", edited by Rab Anderson and Tom Prentice, with enormous expectations.
It is a huge pleasure to be able to report that the book fully lives up to
those expectations. The target audience will probably need no introduction to
Grahams and Donalds, but others might not be aware that Grahams are defined as
Scottish hills over 2,000ft in height and under 2,500ft in height; while
Donalds are Lowland Scottish hills of above 2,000ft in height. What this means
in practice is that there is some overlap between the mountains covered in this
book and those covered in the earlier Corbetts book, as seven Lowland Corbetts
are also Donalds. But that's not a criticism: ensuring the comprehensive
coverage of the latest book has to be the priority.

Anyone who has read the earlier books will not be surprised by the
approach adopted here. Hills and mountains are divided by areas, and within the
areas a series of excursions are mapped out allowing all the desired peaks to
be reached. The production values are outstanding. The descriptions are well
written and the background information is extremely helpful. The copious colour
photography is of a very high standard throughout, and the colour maps are
large enough to allow routes to be plotted onto the more detailed maps you'll
want to take with you: its weight alone means that this is certainly not a book
to carry with you onto the hill. Regrets? We have just one. As the mountains
included are defined by their heights in feet, it's a shame that nowhere
between the covers, even in the tables at the back, could space be found to
give the heights of the hills and mountains covered in feet in addition to the
metres used throughout. But that's hardly a major gripe. This is a wonderful
book. Go out and buy it, either for yourself, or for the hillwalker or
mountaineer in your life.